If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual.

No one should be astonished if in the following discussion of completely new princedoms and of the prince and of government, I bring up the noblest examples. Because, since men almost always walk in the paths beaten by others and carry on their affairs by imitatingeven though it is not possible to keep wholly in the paths of others or to attain the ability of those you imitatea prudent man will always choose to take paths beaten by great men and to imitate those who have been especially admirable, in order that if his ability does not reach theirs, at least it may offer some suggestion of it; and he will act like prudent archers, who, seeing that the mark they plan to hit is too far away and knowing what space can be covered by the power of their bows, take an aim much higher than their mark, not in order to reach with their arrows so great a height, but to be able, with the aid of so high an aim, to attain their purpose.

Niccolo Machiavelli

I don't know that love changes. People change. Circumstances change.

Nicholas Sparks

At the end of her life she was aware of heat but not pain. She had time to consider his eyes, eyes of that blue which is the color of the sky at first light of the morning. She had time to think of him on the Drop, riding Rusher flat out with his black hair flying back from his temples and his neckerchief rippling; to see him laughing with an ease and freedom he would never find again in the long life which stretched out for him beyond hers, and it was his laughter she took with her as she went out, fleeing the light and heat in to the silkly, consoling dark, calling to him over and over as she went, calling bird and bear and hare and fish.

Stephen King

If you're on thin ice, you might as well dance.

Source Unknown

Concision in style, precision in thought, decision in life.

Victor Hugo

Modern science cannot explain why the laws of physics are exactly balanced for animal life to exist.

Robert Lanza

There's only two people in your life you should lie to... the police and your girlfriend.

Jack Nicholson

Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don't think so... I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games.

Haruki Murakami

I've always had questions about what it meant to be a protester, to be in the minority. Are the people who are trying to find peace, who are trying to have the Constitution apply to everybody, are they really the radicals? We're not protesting from the outside. We're inside.

Gil Scott-Heron

To defend a country you need an army, but to defend a civilization you need education.

Jonathan Sacks

I would be willing, yes glad, to see a battle every day during my life.

George Armstrong Custer

I meant, said Ipslore bitterly, what is there in this world that truly makes living worth while? Death thought about it Cats, he said eventually, Cats are Nice

Terry Pratchett